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>Acrobat was from the start designed as a way of displaying documents
>across platforms without losing layout information, sort of an
>application-level version of "Display Postscript."

My one beef is that, once again, Adobe has handily ignored a particular
major platform in their viewer support...

>In this respect it
>succeeds far better than WinHelp (I've yet to be able to open a WinHelp
>file on an HP Unix workstation, while I can even read Inside Macintosh
>volumes on an HP using Acrobat).

On the flipside, I can view WinHelp files on my OS/2 system, but I can't
view Acrobat files unless I have Windows support installed.

>how often I've heard a non-Windows user complain, "But if I'd wanted a
>Windows machine, I would have *bought* a Windows machine!" Yes, you can

The one that really gets me is the all-too-pat "but you can use our
Windows version under OS/2" answer that I get from far too many vendors
when asking about platform support. Excuse me, I didn't ask you if I
coule do that. Maybe I don't WANT Windows on this machine. Maybe I don't
WANT to give up 12MB of drive space as a runtime for your software
(including Acrobat).

>still manage to hold on to those users, but their threshold for switching
>has now been lowered, and you will most likely lose them to the best of
>your competitors to avoid that particular trap.

>For those users, Acrobat might be considered acceptable "neutral
>territory."

HTML is a far more neutral, and now a perfectly viable option (as long
people don't start going crazy on Netscrap-proprietary tags).

Your friend and mine,
Matt
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"Maybe all I need, besides my pills and surgery,
is a new metaphor for... reality." -- Queensryche

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